WhatsApp goes down on New Year’s Eve

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Obsession

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Written by

Obsession

As New Year’s Eve parties are getting underway across Europe, with people messaging friends and relatives to coordinate when to be where, WhatsApp has gone down for some users. The Facebook-owned messaging service has over 900 million users, and troubles connecting to the service were widely reported across Europe Dec. 31.

DownDetector, a site that monitors internet and mobile services, marked an uptick in outage reports starting at about 4pm GMT (11am EST) today. While Reuters reported that the outages were contained within Europe and were now fixed, DownDetector is still showing issues across the continent, as well as the Americas. (Quartz in New York attempted to connect to WhatsApp multiple times in the last hour, but was unable to do so by the time of publishing.)

“Some people have had trouble accessing WhatsApp today,” a WhatsApp spokesperson told Quartz. “We’re working to restore service back to 100% for everyone and we apologize for the inconvenience.” WhatsApp did not say what had caused the issue, or whether it would affect any other revelers as they begin to prepare for one of the busiest party evenings of the year.

Earlier this month, a court in Brazil ordered the service to be switched off across the country. The ban lasted 12 hours, but Brazilians—about 90% of those with the internet use WhatsApp—voiced their frustration by switching to alternative messaging services, like Telegram. Perhaps there will be an uptick in New Year’s greetings sent over Facebook Messenger, Viber, Line, or maybe even plain-old fashioned text message. If things get really bad, you can always use your phone for the thing it was invented for: making phone calls.